


Who Would You Fight?

by orphan_account



Category: Fight Club (1999), Fight Club - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Community: femmeslash, F/F, First Kiss, Gender or Sex Swap, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:55:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25856230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: What if Tyler and The Narrator were women?My idealized self looks like someone I’d hate, and she looks like someone who’d hate me
Relationships: Tyler Durden/Narrator
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11





	Who Would You Fight?

**Author's Note:**

> First fic! It probably isn't too good. In this story I have taken the characters Tyler Durden and The Narrator and made female characters based off of them! I thought it would be interesting to have women as the main characters in the universe of Fight Club, so here it is. This story explores wanting to be with someone, as well as wanting to actually be them.

As soon as we walked into her dilapidated house on Paper St. (although, who knew if this place was even hers), I began to take notice of all the shit crowding her counters and tables. For someone so concerned with casting away all your possessions or whatever, she sure had a lot of crap. Not  _ useful  _ crap, per say. No pots, pans, no bookshelves to hold the volumes of literature lying on her floor. The lightswitches didn’t even have covers. Just a gaping black hole with a little white switch in the middle, like a switch that could turn the universe on and off. 

An LP of the album  _ Like a Virgin _ with the #1 single on the back circled in sharpie,  _ Material Girl. _

_ How clever. _

She had all these little knick-knacks scattered about. Little figurines, a frog holding a paintbrush, a little blue sheep, one of those tacky cat clocks where the tail and eyes move, only they didn’t, and the time was wrong. 

Books stacked on the ground, I hadn’t heard of most of them. And magazines with the fashion models cut out, probably long ago pasted in some sort of collage. Literary journals that looked like they had never been touched. 

That’s the first thing I do whenever I go into someone's house. I assess their stuff. Sometimes I even do that at my own house, I walk around and just look at all the goddamn stuff I own. 

The house smelled like rubbing alcohol and cheap Victoria’s Secret perfume, it was probably called  _ Heavenly _ or something. 

Therese told me she was going to go take care of her cuts. She had been able to get some good hits on me, whereas I had only been able to scrape her with my long fake nails. Any punch I laid on her seemed to be completely absorbed somehow, even though I thought I managed to hit her pretty hard a few times. It was like I got all of the wounds for the punches I gave her. 

I wish I could think of a word other than wound … injury, laceration, gash… I don’t know. All of those words inspire imagery of severed arms and scalped heads. Things that leave a mark. The bruises Therese gave me will go away one day. 

_ I don’t want to die without any scars. _

I went to the bathroom to go check the bruises in the mirror. She was in there, but I seemed to have caught her getting undressed for a bath. I quickly turned around, embarrassed. Nothing worse than being walked in on. 

“What are you doing?” her voice called from the bathroom.

“Nothing! I mean, I wanted to check out my … injuries, I guess, in the mirror”

“Well then come in, we’re both girls”

“Yeah, but…”

I walked into the bathroom, trying to avoid looking at her. I never understood how people could just… be nude around other people. The worst part of my day in highschool was having to undress in the locker room around the other girls. I would hide in the back, slip off my regular shirt under my P.E. uniform, and then slide off my pants at the last possible second. Someone would try to talk to me with her boobs out and all I would be thinking the entire length of the conversation was “ _ what the fuck?” _ . I assume that’s not a universal experience.

As I applied some vitamin K cream to my bruises she tried to strike up a conversation. 

“If you could fight anyone in the world, who would it be?”

The first person who pops into my head is a girl I went to highschool with.

She was perfect, everything I wanted to be I suppose. Her hair fell in curly tresses and her skin never was tarnished by a single little red dot.  _ God,  _ I’ve got to be the only goddamn grown woman on earth who still gets acne like this. She could wear any piece of clothing and look good. Hell, she could show up to school wearing a paisley fucking print pan suit and still look like a million bucks. I’ve come to find that the accessories don’t make the outfit, the body does. Your own body is the defining accessory, really. She was so beautiful and I hated her. I don’t really know why. 

_ My idealized self looks like a woman I hate. _

She kind of looked like Therese, come to think of it. I liked Therese better because she knew my name. 

I turned to Therese and told her the person I’d like to fight most is some politician, I figured it would be more amusing. 

She told me she wished she could fight her mom. Her mom who had six kids and who got married at 19.

“As soon as I turned 18 my mom told me that I should start thinking about how I wanted to spend the rest of my life, and more specifically who I would be spending it with”

She looked up at the ceiling and covered her face with a washcloth. 

“If I ever ended up like her, I think that I would die”

I loved that. I love hyperbole. When my apartment blew up I said that it was the end of the world, and it was. If Therese ever did end up married with six kids I _do_ think that she would die. 

“Hey, if I ever do end up like that come and tell me. Give me a sign. Just hold up a big sign that says ‘you’re not who you wanted to be when you grew up’” 

She was so ethereal in that moment. I couldn’t imagine Therese ever “ending up” a certain way because she could only exist in the present. To me she held no future, knew no past.

Therese stepped out of the bath and wrapped a towel around her body. She sat on the edge of the tub and said something I’ll never forget:

“I hope I’ll never be complete, I hope I’m never content with my life”

I offered some words to complete her musing:

“I hope I’ll never be perfect”

She beckoned me over and handed me an adhesive bandage and turned her back so I could put it on a cut she couldn’t reach. 

I had thought about her a lot, but only in the abstract. Daydreams about her stoic eyes, her long hair, and the way her chest looked in her white button up. The way she would coax me into fighting her, she could make me do anything. 

This was real, addressing the cut and touching her back, touching her without hurting her. Therese acted like she was bred to not feel pain, who knows if she could even feel my fingers, light on her shoulder blades. 

_ She’s so fucking pretty, I hate myself _ . 

Whenever I start thinking certain thoughts I feel this immense guilt. I feel guilty for thinking that someone like her could…

I slid down the wall and sat on the floor, Therese was still sitting on the edge of the bathtub. 

_ I wish I were dead. _

No I didn’t, I wished everyone else was. 

Without looking at me Therese questioned me

“What are you thinking about, psycho girl?”

“Nothing important” 

She sat down across from me.

“What do I mean to you?”

How Therese managed to ask that question without showing the slightest bit of vulnerability is beyond me. I thought about saying that I liked her because she reminds me of me, but that would have been on the same level as hearing “twins!” from an ugly friend.

“I don’t really know, I feel like we know each other, like you really know who I am, or I guess who I wish I was, I’m not sure”

“I know you too well”

I looked away, I could never maintain eye contact with Therese for too long. There was something behind her eyes that scared the fucking shit out of me. She snapped to capture my direct attention again. 

“What do you want?”

_ What the fuck? _

“Want? Like in life?” I stuttered “I don’t know really, maybe I will, one day”

Therese scooted closer and pressed my shoulders against the wall, I tried not to think of the words  _ seduce _ and  _ suffocate.  _

She forced me to look her in the eyes, “If you don’t know what you want, you’ll end up with a lot you don’t”

Therese pressed her lips hard to mine. She tasted like lipgloss and heresy, limeade and violence, candy mints and treachery. I pushed her away. 

“Therese I kind of wish you didn’t like me as much as you did. It makes me like you less. It’s embarrassing for you, to do that to  _ me _ ”

“Why, ‘cause we’re both chicks?”

“No, I’m just not  _ your type _ ”

“Yes you are, you’re _ just like me _ ”

_ Don’t cry _

“No I’m not. I don’t deserve that from you”

“But you deserve to be hit by me? You deserve to have me kill you?”

_ Don’t cry, don’t cry _

“Therese, just- I can’t explain it, and if I did you wouldn’t understand”

“ _ I understand everything you say, psycho girl” _

She got up and turned to walk out of the door. 

“I love you, though”

I loved her, too, in a sense

Therese walked away, and I was left with her name still leaving a taste in my mouth, like blood, all too familiar. 

_ I am Jane’s broken heart _

_ I am Jane’s overwhelming sense of uncertainty _

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
